an archdeacon or a bishop.
Besides, I felt that I had accomplished something. Lalage had committed
herself to an approval of a hypothetical Miss Battersby. If a governess
could be found in the world who would stamp about the floor and shriek
that word, or if Miss Battersby would learn the habit of violent
profanity, Lalage would quite like her. It was a definite concession. I
had a mental vision of the changed Miss Battersby, a lady freckled from
head to foot, magnificently contemptuous of glycerine and cucumber, who
hated clothes and tore them when she could, who rejoiced to see blue
dresses with blobs of bright red paint on them, who scoffed openly at
Blake's poetry, who had been to sea or companied with private soldiers
on the battlefield, and so garnered a store of scorching blasphemies. I
imagined Lalage taking this paragon to her heart, clinging to her with
warm affection, leading her into pigstys for confidential chats, and, if
she published a magazine at all, calling it _Our Feline Friend_. But the
dream faded, as such dreams do. Miss Battersby was plainly incapable of
rising to the heights required.

It is to my credit that in the end I did make an effort to soften
Lalage.

"I wish," I said, "that you'd try and call her Pussy instead of Cat."

"Why? What's the difference?"

"The meaning is the same," I said. "But it's a much kinder way of
putting it. You ought to try and be kind, Lalage."

She pondered this advice for a while and then said:

"I would, if only she'd stop kissing me."

"Does she do it often?"

"Every morning and every evening and sometimes during the day."

That settled it. I could not press my point. Once, years afterward, Miss
Battersby very nearly kissed me, but even before there was any chance
of such a thing I was able to sympathize with Lalage. I crept out of the
pigsty and went home again, leading my injured bicycle.

CHAPTER II

There is a short cut which leads from my house to the church, and
therefore, of course, to the rectory, which stands, as rectories often
do, close to the church. The path--it can only be used by those who
walk--leads past the garden and through a wood to the high road. It was
on this path, a quarter of a mile or so from the road, that I met Canon
Beresford, about ten days after my interview with Lalage in the pigsty.
Certain wood pigeons of low morality had been attacking our gooseberry
bushes. My mother, instigated by the gardener, demanded the